Pre-determined and (sometimes) ad hoc learning achievement criteria, goals, and objectives are assigned by an instructor at the beginning of an academic term for all students. Historically, these expectations are generally conveyed in a course syllabus or course outline at the beginning of a term. As students academically progress through a physical or synchronous virtual classroom, assessments and grades assigned, based on the syllabus content, are summed up (or curved based on the highest grade in the course) to provide a final achievement mark that indicates a student's understanding and level of mastery of the subject matter taught. There is no other tracking mechanism, other than traditional marks, generally assigned post assignment, quiz, or test, within a classroom structure to help an instructor understand when a student may not comprehend the material covered, or understand a certain level of mastery needed to succeed in the next level. As such, it is difficult to assess how a student is progressing in a course during a course term. As a result, in online group learning courses in which students are grouped into groups, it is difficult to assess whether the group to which a student is assigned is beneficial to the student.
What is needed is to be able to assess, during a course term, how a student is progressing in an online group learning course. What is further needed is to be able to monitor networked activity that occurs during a course term to be able to thoroughly assess a student's performance during the course term. However, various technical problems in conventional systems make such assessments difficult. For example, in conventional chat sessions with multiple users (including, in an online group learning context, one or more instructors, and students), it may be difficult to keep track of who is communicating with other users. For instance, conventional multi-user chat message systems do not permit linking messages with one another or identifying a recipient of a chat message from a sender. Furthermore, the transient nature of chat messaging generally makes it more difficult to perform analytics on such messaging. Furthermore, conventional online learning systems typically fail to take into account real-time academic achievement activity, or social connections between users participating in the course.
These and other drawbacks exist with conventional online learning systems.